Bubble Motion Wants You to Call, Not Tweet

More talking, less texting. That’s the spin Sequoia Capital-backed Bubble Motion is putting on mobile social networking.

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Bubble Motion has inked deals with Indian celebs such as Kareena Kapoor, right, to use its service.

Where others who have come before, like Twitter, caught on with 140 characters or less, this start-up thinks people would rather leave voice messages than type out an SMS. A new service it’s started called Bubbly lets customers leave a voicemail-type message, which their followers can dial in to hear.

Most of Bubble Motion’s customers are in India, among the urban youth who have taken to SMS-based mobile networking like SMS GupShup. An older service from the start-up called Bubble Talk already lets people leave voice messages for one other person.

The “vast majority” of its 100 million users are in South Asia, and the company has processed more than 1 billion messages since launching two years ago, says Thomas Clayton, Bubble Motion’s chief executive.

“Voice is richer,” he says. “It’s a different medium that conveys a lot more emotion than text does.”

But voice also costs. Sending a message over Bubble Talk, the older service, costs 75 paise, or 1.6 cents. So does hearing it more than once. For Bubbly, it’s free to post a voice message, but listening costs at least a minute of airtime per message, and Bubble Motion makes its money by taking a cut from the carriers.

The start-up has partnerships with Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications, India’s two largest carriers. It’s also signed up Bollywood stars Kareena Kapoor and Aamir Khan to start putting out voice posts for their fans.

Still, the costs could deter people from using Bubble Motion, especially when Twitter and other SMS-based services are free. But “people are used to the economics of texting, which are similar,” says Gaurav Garg, a partner at Sequoia Capital. He declined to say how much Sequoia has invested in the Singapore-based start-up.